A lack of a meritocratic environment is the number one reason why so many people are dissatisfied with their jobs based on research conducted for my book. There’s nothing more maddening than when someone less deserving is promoted over you due to politics instead of performance.
One of the main reasons why I left finance was because there was no correlation between performance and compensation anymore. In the past, if you made the firm X, you would be compensated X times a certain percentage. Given all the new rules by various governments as well as the need for profitable divisions to subsidize less profitable divisions, we all got paid roughly the same no matter how well we delivered. Working in a Socialistic style environment is fine if you’re not very motivated or are an underperformer. However, at the age of 34, I still had plenty of fight left, so I left.
Entrepreneurship is about as close as it gets to a meritocracy as it gets. All your wins and loses are due to your own efforts. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. It’s as simple as that. However, even with entrepreneurship, not everything is as meritocratic as it seems. If you so happen to have Ron Conway, the billionaire father of Angel Investing on speed dial, and Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo as your wife, chances are higher you will succeed.
Even though I wrote about how to buy your way to online success, I’m pretty much against buying myself into anything. I only wrote the post to highlight the other side of the story. It feels empty when you don’t build something on your own. Some would liken it to cheating.
Given entrepreneurship has some flaws in the pure meritocracy argument, I’d like to drill down even further and talk about becoming a successful online publisher. I’ll share my views as well as several other views from Yakezie Members.
